Chasing Ghosts and Irish Pubs

I went to Ireland on the trail of two men, William James McClure, (1815-1895) who was born, lived, and died in Antrim County, Ireland and his son Robert Montgomery McClure, who came to America from there at age 18.  I just learned William’s name, and that of his wife Sarah (1815-1914), about a month ago.  His name and his dates of birth and death are absolutely all I know about him.


I’m a bit more familiar with Robert Montgomery (1842-1893) who was born in Ballymena (or was it Ballymoney?  My father always mentioned the two towns together) and sailed at age 18 for America.  
I know he had an arrangement before he left Ireland in 1860.  His passage was paid by a friend or relative, James Gillan, originally from Antrim County who was farming near Tremont, Illinois.  It was agreed that Robert would work on Gillan’s farm until his debt, payment of his passage, was paid.  As far as I know he did that, working seven years for Gillan, and then married his daughter Sara and moved to the Colfax, Illinois area where he bought land and farmed.  Facts.

But I know Robert Montgomery as a man, a person, hardly at all.  My Dad told me his father described my great grandfather, the Irishman, as “stern” and left the raising of the children largely up to his wife, applying discipline himself, harshly, only when needed.  I know one single story about the Irishman Robert pulling my grandfather Willie from the freezing water of a pond where they were cutting ice.  That’s it.

My great grandfather was father to William James McClure (named after his grandfather in Ireland), who farmed near Danvers and had a son named Dean, who did the same.  Dean was my Dad.  Simple straight line there.

William James McClure                              Great Great Grandfather

Robert Montgomery McClure                   Great Grandfather

William James McClure                              Grandfather

Dean Lyle McClure                                      Father

David Bruce McClure

Five generations of McClures, two born in Ireland, three in America, with a sixth underway.  Dean, my Dad, told me a lot about his father William, whom they called him Willie.  He farmed with horses, bought a steam threshing machine he would take on a threshing run to farms almost to Iowa, played the harmonica, threw horseshoes, and loved practical jokes.  I have a feel for him.

But Robert Montgomery who left for America and his father, William James who stayed in the Ballymena/Ballymoney area, are largely ghosts.  I know of them, but nothing about them.  I was out to change that. 

I’ve learned the hard way how this works.  We learn of the dead from the living, mostly through stories spoken and remembered.  After those with the first-hand memories die, unless they pass on stories that people remember, or have words or pictures printed on paper or preserved digitally, they are lost to the past.  By going to Ireland, I hoped to shore up our McClure history, this time writing it down.  On a tombstone in a cemetery between Ballymena and Ballymoney I read this inscription on some unrelated grave - “Forever Remebered.”  That’s a lovely thought but it just isn’t true.

As luck would have it, days before I left for Ireland, I ran into an old friend who had just returned.  He had visited a small country church where an ancestor was believed to have been married.  As he described it, he “could feel a piece of that man’s heart” as he stood near the altar where his ancestor once stood.  I longed to find a similar place and experience that feeling.

We landed in Dublin.  The ghost McClures were out of range.  The family I came from were Scots Irish, and as far as I know our whole story was written in the North in Antrim County.

But Dublin is big and beautiful.  We had two nights there.  Dublin gave up its treasures to us, mostly musical.  On one of those nights we went on a musical pub crawl with two musicians through the streets of old Dublin in and around the Temple Bar district.

All the music we  heard and musical lore we learned came to us in the upstairs rooms of three pubs.  Sometimes they call these rooms snugs, small rooms fitting 25 people or so, at low tables with squat stools.  “Nearer the floor for when you topple” was the reason given for their size.  At each a small bar in the corner served pints, half pints, and whiskey.  The musicians sat among us on slightly higher stools.  We started in Temple Bar.  I don’t remember the name of the pub.  They collected our tickets and explained the evening before us.

The man doing the talking and playing guitar introduced the band – Sarah. All told there were but two musicians.  The one who did most of the talking played the guitar and that flat Irish drum called a bodhran.  Sarah played the flute, not a silver flute but a wooden Irish flute, and occasionally a penny whistle made of tin.  I was hoping for a bigger band, a fuller sound., until I heard them play.  I was amazed at the music they got out of those instruments, and the number of notes that filled those three rooms.

Two or three songs and we were off through the streets of Dublin to the Ha’Penny Pub, then over the River Liffey on this beautiful pedestrian bridge to Brannigans.

According to the guitar player, who talked more as people bought him more drinks, true Irish folk music is never amplified and rarely played on stages.  The best music, he believed, is shared by friends and patrons in pubs in what are called “sessions.”  Musicians gather to play, inspired by their love of music,  with the hope that pints would appear at their table. 

“Don’t be fooled.  We all know the same tunes, a sheet of music on a stand you will never see, and we play our hearts out trying to make the tunes sound better.  Always the same chord changes, the same basic progression, but with a relentless push to put on our own touches. Tis well and good that people listen, but the session players don’t give a damn about you.  They’re there for themselves and each other, hopin’ against hope it all comes out right.”

Not only did the musicians play their instruments, they talked. And talked.  It was Ireland after all.   Here’s what we learned from them about Irish music.  Tunes are instrumental.  Songs have words.  There is a bright line between the two.  Irish musicians never claim they are going to play a tune and break into singing.  It’s just not done.

The tunes are of two basic types, reels and jigs.  For musicians, I gather it’s much about time signature. Jigs are 6-8 time, while reels are 4-4.  The numbers mean little to me, it’s about how they sound.  Thankfully they translated the math to English.  Jigs, in this case a single jig, say the word jiggedy (3 syllables) with the accent on jig in a repeating pattern.  JIG e ty, JIG e ty, JIG e ty.  And then there are variations, double jigs (carrots and cabbages), slip jigs, and slides.  Way over my head.

There’s also horn pipes, in the nautical tradition, and polkas, and mazurkas and all types of tunes and songs.  Polkas are helped by an accordion of course.  We never saw a full up Lawrence Welk style piano accordion but rather the little button box kind of squeeze boxes.  The musicians explained there are only three truly Irish instruments:, the harp (usually a small 13 string harp called a cruit), the Irish (different than Scottish) bagpipes called uilleann or union pipes,  and the bodhran.  There is also something called a timpan, played with a bow and a plectrum, rarely heard these days. 

The wooden Irish flute is hard to claim as Ireland’s own because flutes were played all over the world since music has been played.  I’d put the bodhran in that category too.  It looked very similar to a flat drum I’d seen played in Morocco that they claimed was theirs.  Why we want to split hairs on these things is beyond me.  You’ll hear banjo in Irish music, fiddles almost always, and any umber of instruments.  But the pub crawl musicians were purists.  The guitarist didn’t apologize for his non-Irish instrument though.

Jigs began and still are, when played more slowly, dance tunes for, you guessed it, Irish jigs.  There is little percussion in Irish folk music because originally  the tapping slapping shoes of dancers with their feet flying and their arms straight down at their sides originally kept the time.  A dancer joined the band at Brannigans and did all his steps on 3'x3'' square of plywood.  The story on not moving their arms is that the bartenders in Ireland used to dance behind the bar for money, and there wasn't enough room to put their arms out.  When they came out from behind the bar they couldn't change.  I'm not sure I believe that, but that's what I was told.

Reels are the hard driving tunes of Irish folk music in 4-4 time.  Phonetically that’s a UK bus repeated over and over “double decker, double decker, double decker.”  Reels are also played, usually more slowly, for Irish traditional dances called “Ceilis”.  We saw some Ceili dancing later in the trip.  Think square dancing.

Played fast, reels become the raucous rocking traditional Irish music you probably think of first.  Something about reels makes me want to drink.  Well jigs too.  Irish music in general.  Perhaps music in general.  OK, yes, I’ve been known to feel the urge to drink in deathly quiet rooms.  I admit it.  But nothing makes me want to drink more than Irish music.

Click this Irish reel done right and let’s end with a session.  


Next up, Stories from Donegal.